Human Pony

Bruce Springsteen has always been steeped in mainstream pop/rock music, using it as a vocabulary for what he wanted to say about weightier matters. And he has always written generic pop as well, though he's usually given the results away to performers like Southside Johnny and Gary "U.S." Bonds. Sometimes, those songs have been hits - think of the Pointer Sisters' "Fire" or Bonds' "This Little Girl Is Mine." Occasionally, Springsteen has used such material here and there on his own albums; some of it can be found on The River, for example. But Human Touch was the first Bruce Springsteen album to consist entirely of this kind of minor genre material, material he seems capable of turning out endlessly and effortlessly - the point of "I Wish I Were Blind" is that the singer doesn't want to see, now that his baby has left him; "57 Channels (And Nothin' On)" is about TV…

Across America a mysterious disease is turning ordinary people into raving, paranoid murderers who inflict brutal horrors on strangers, themselves, and even their own families. Working under the government's shroud of secrecy, CIA operative Dew Phillips crisscrosses the country trying in vain to capture a live victim. With only decomposing corpses for clues, CDC epidemiologist Margaret Montoya races to analyze the science behind this deadly contagion. She discovers that these killers all have one thing in common ' they've been contaminated by a bioengineered parasite, shaped by a complexity far beyond the limits of known science. Meanwhile Perry Dawsey ' a hulking former football star now resigned to life as a cubicle-bound desk jockey ' awakens one morning to find several mysterious welts growing on his body. Soon Perry finds himself acting and thinking strangely, hearing voices . . . he is infected.